Yahoo! is using machine learning to identify low-quality online ads and understand why they fail to engage users. Speaking at London Data Fest, Yahoo!’s Director of Research Mounia Lalmas explained how her team developed a model accounting for why some advertisements work and others do not. Most of Yahoo!’s efforts, Lalmas said, are focused on native advertising, especially […]

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced the company he helms is going to spend $250 million on developing self-driving cars over the next couple of years. The revelation was made during a speech at Los Angeles Auto Show Automobility. While the sum is considerable, it is safe to assume the semiconductors giant will mostly focus on […]

The UK’s Government Office for Science has released a new report exploring how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning might be used to innovate governance. The report was authored by Chief Scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport, and it looks into how the government could resort to emerging technologies to improve data analysis, guide decision making and […]

A robot using the same chips powering driverless cars solved a Rubik’s Cube in the record-busting time of 637 milliseconds— by comparison, the fastest human time is 4.9 seconds. The robot, called Sub1 Reloaded was designed by German semiconductor manufacturer Infineon and was first showcased at the Electronica fair in Munich. The robot first analyses the cube […]

Sea cows are not exactly small animals, but they can be hard to spot when they roam across the ocean. That is bad news for scientist trying to protect these endangered marine mammals from looming extinction: any conservation programme worth its salt starts from keeping track of how animal populations migrate and change over time. That is a […]

Google DeepMind is teaming up with game developer Blizzard to release a video-game doubling as an Artificial Intelligence testing ground. The London-based AI powerhouse is collaborating with Blizzard to adapt sci-fi game StarCraft II as an environment for AI research. Games and video-games have long been DeepMind’s tools of choices. The organisation started off in the […]

Artificial Intelligence pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber thinks earthling Artificial Intelligence is bound to conquer the Milky Way after building millions of autonomous factories in our solar system. Speaking at the WIRED 2016 event in London, the German computer scientist behind recurrent neural networks said smart machines will push us aside and go on independently to reclaim their role as […]

Cathy O’Neill knows data science too well to trust it blindly. A former data cruncher in a Wall Street hedge fund, O’Neill witnessed firsthand how data-based models were harnessed to put up opaque trading schemes that contributed to setting off a financial catastrophe. More recently, as an academic and blogger, she has been observing how almighty algorithms— fuelled by the […]